EIL Intercultural Learning

Its Friday evening and I've just completed my fourth week working at Thembacare and I am exhausted! But only physically, because mentally I am on top of the world and loving every minute of my time here in South Africa. I now know what it feels like to love your work so much that you miss it on the weekends and look forward to Monday mornings.

So its Friday evening and I'm relaxing with friends having a beer when someone asks me what I'm doing here. Having explained to her, she turns and says, "Volunteer? Why would you want to volunteer to work?". It was a joke of course but it got me thinking. I had forgotten that I was not being paid for my work here. I had forgotten because it was the furthest thing from my mind and it seems so unimportant. Not for one second, even when exhausted from driving all day, or trying to handle six hyper children on the school run, have I thought "and I'm not even being paid for this".

If I had wanted to do this work and to get paid for it, it would never have been possible. Volunteering has allowed me to come here and to understand the complex situation these children live in. Not only must they try to understand and to deal with their health problems but they all have family problems such as abuse, abandonment, domestic violence, lack of food security, stigma and desperate living conditions. When you see that every day here, missing a couple months salary is the furthest thing from your mind.

However on the up side, I have been here long enough to see a number of children arrive at Thembacare frail, undernourished and frightened only to transform, within a couple of weeks, to happy, settled, thriving and energetic children. Its great to be part of that process!